Although Quine's ultimate aim is to argue against the analytic/synthetic distinction he begins by simply displaying interconnections among a number of concepts. The real heart of his argument against the distinction comes only in the last two sections of the paper, which we will discuss next time. In preparation for that, you should ask yourself, at each stage, what it would be like to abandon the distinctions and other concepts that Quine links to the idea of analyticity.

• In §1, Quine considers three fairly direct ways of defining analytic truth--as truth in all possible worlds (20), as truth in virtue of meaning (21), and as logical truth or the result of substituting synonyms for synonyms in such a truth (23). His discussion of the distinction between intension and extension and of essence (21f) is less directly tied to his argument but it will be important for us since it is relevant to issues raised in Kripke's book. (The final discussion of Carnap's state descriptions (23f) is a historical artifact; as Quine notes, it was never intended as a general account of analyticity but it might have been thought to provide one by a reader of this paper when it was first published.)

• The connection of the idea of synonymy to analyticity leads Quine to consider the concept of definition in §2. Here he distinguishes three sorts of definitions--the lexicographic definitions (24f), Carnap's explication (25), and abbreviating definitions (26). Note the differences he points to; his argument is essentially that the idea of definition will seem to eliminate doubts about analyticity only if we equivocate between different senses of "definition" and mistakenly combine properties no one sort could have.

• The discussion in §3 is another that has connections with Kripke's book. The key point is that interchangeability without change of truth value provides an account of synonymy only if we consider substitution in contexts containing terms like "necessarily," so necessity and related concepts are again implicated in Quine's doubts about analyticity (29). This leads to a distinction between extensional and non-extensional languages.

• In §4, doubts about analyticity are connected with doubts about the idea of semantical rules (33). Although the discussion will often seem to turn on technical issues, this section is perhaps broadest in its import; because Quine is in effect questioning the very notion of meaning. He questions it in a way which recalls earlier work in which he casts doubt on the idea of truth by convention and his doubts about analyticity can be seen to at least run parallel to broad doubts about that idea. The full implications of Quine's doubts about analyticity start to be indicated in the last paragraph of this section (34), where he casts doubt on the distinction between matters of language and matters of fact.